The sequel to this chapter is The Moral Genotype II: The Passion of the Insula & Politics of Disgust. It provides additional evidence on the nature of political biology and environmental pressures. All chapters are linked at the end.
I listened to this song while writing. Enjoy.
Bio = Biological
Foundation = The genetics underpinning your temperament and morality
Biofoundationalism = The biological nature of your morality, political views, personality, and behaviors.
How our brains are wired informs what we believe before we’re aware we believe it.
This essay begins with the psychological layer, where political stances are socially legible, then it reviews neurological evidence and the true origins of our beliefs. The information in here is worth your time. If internalized, it should alter how you interpret and engage the Other Side. Hopefully you’ll stop seeing an adversary and start seeing a complement.
The Temperamental Chain
Politics is the study and strategy of scaled human coordination. How you believe society should be organized is based on the values you believe it should prioritize. Unsurprisingly, people have very different views on what the higher-order and lower-order values should be.
Where do values, virtues, and ethics come from? Our moral foundations.
Political beliefs come from values, and values come from morality… so where does morality come from? If you read the “right” books and see the “right” facts, then you get the “right” morality? Which of those moral foundations are “right” and which are “wrong”?
If we assume political beliefs are educated choices, we implicitly think moral values are a top-down socialized “read the right books” discussion, not a bottom-up biological one. It’s time to take a hard, honest look at these instinctive stances, and how they emerge.
The Moral Genotype
Your political views are directly derived from, and an expression of, your moral foundations. This is why political and social “truths” are so contentious and divisive: they’re conflicting forms of moral tradeoffs and competing priorities, narrated as values.
Even when provided with the same facts, we don’t agree on what should be done. Because we don’t have the same values. Because we don’t have the same temperaments.
What is temperament?
Temperament: An animal’s innate behavioral and emotional patterns. The genetic architecture that governs reactivity, personality traits, moral instincts, and default orientation toward the world.
It’s what you do before you decide what to do: your latency to anger, appetite for novelty, tolerance for ambiguity, loyalty to the in-group, feelings of disgust
Temperament is biologically primitive and causally upstream of personality. It is heritable, observable in infancy, stable across lifespans, and conserved across species.
It’s not learned, chosen, or installed by top-down culture. It’s a bottom-up biological expression. You do not control your temperament, it controls you.
This essay is not a relativistic philosophical message; it’s a neuro-architectural explanation why people so often disagree on what ‘truth’, ‘right’, or ‘fair’ even means. A theory of mind of The Other is elusive because our minds are genuinely structured differently! We speak contrasting moral languages.
I know you’ll probably say morality is absolute and yours is the right kind; however the other guy, the one who believes different things than you, thinks this too. Where does that leave us? The “Evil Team” vs “Good Team”? Of course our team is always the virtuous and pure one.
Political discourse will continue to be a wheel-spinning waste of time if this is our perception of The Other and different moral priorities. Let’s attempt to understand it.
A man’s interpretation of truth is downstream of his morality, and his morality is downstream of his temperament, and his temperament is a direct, explicit, observable, measurable output of his amygdala size, anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) activity, and insula activation patterns. These are not the same for everyone. Your moral language originates from here.
Temperament → Morality → Values → Political Beliefs
We can predict your political beliefs with 83% accuracy from a brain scan alone. We don’t need to know anything else about you: not your opinions, favorite books, education, none of it. And this is without AI. This hard reality cannot be ignored.
We can triangulate political stances via functional brain connectivity even while you sit quietly doing nothing. With zero political stimulus, the amygdala, inferior frontal gyrus, and hippocampus light up differently for liberals and conservatives at rest. Idle, and still broadcasting allegiances. Source: Functional connectivity signatures of political ideology
The raw architecture of your neural tissue exposes your beliefs without you saying a word. This shouldn’t be disheartening. The human condition deserves to be honestly recognized, exalted, and doesn’t need us to protect it with noble lies.
Biofoundationalism’s systemization and empiricism should alter your relationship with political reality by recalibrating your understanding of the conversation you’re actually having. Political disagreement is almost never the nominal point of contention; it runs much deeper.
Immaculate Conception & The Blank Slate
Why does the same information evoke such radically different conclusions for people? Does one side have truth, and the other just needs better facts? What if the facts are identical? How are the takeaways still diametrically opposed? And why does it so often split into two camps opposing camps?
Why are political exchanges basically some variation of this:
"Wow, you actually were unaware of this FACT? Also you failed to mention this FACT and another FACT that undermines your whole world view. Read a book!"
"Aha foolish you are for completely ignoring these little-known FACTS over here. Which when viewed in conjunction with this FACT, shows you to be nothing more than a chimp in shoes!"
It’s because you’re dealing with a natural dyad.
A dyad is a pair of oppositional and interdependent forces, each defined in reference to the other. E.g. day is undefined without night; left has no orientation without right; order has no point of reference without chaos.
The masculine and feminine are a dyad: this is expressed morphologically.
The conservative and liberal are a dyad: this is expressed cognitively.
What’s feminine is only known by what’s masculine. What’s conservative is in reference to what’s liberal. These antagonistic forces are also complementary; they require the opposing side to exist. Dyadic.
We recognize the sex-based dyad because the physical evidence of breasts and broad shoulders is something we can see and touch. Sane minds don’t protest that men and women have disparate innate masculine and feminine traits rooted in biology. Yet we’re deeply uncomfortable with a cognitive dyad. Systemic neurological differences make many very uneasy. We can’t stand being told we have predetermined programming and aren’t 100% agentic. We like hearing we can be whatever want, a fresh canvas.
Like morphological dyads, cognitive dyads exhibit different traits, and both have been engineered by nature to behave this way. We resist this because it undermines the dogma that people are Blank Slates.
The Blank Slate is civic theology and Western religious origin story. It’s the liberal-democratic Immaculate Conception: citizens emerge from the womb as commoditized pieces of clay, equal potential, infinitely plastic, unburdened by the original sin of genetic inheritance.
The myth presupposes evolution built the entire human body through selection pressure, then politely stopped at the brain.
This theory informs basically everything you’ve been trained to think about human capabilities and biodiversity. Whether you’re rightwing or leftwing, both adhere to Blank Slate gospel in their own way.
Just as Jesus was immaculately conceived without sex as the son of God, citizens in a liberal democracy are immaculately conceived without genetic differences as Blank Slates. Biology is neoliberal Original Sin, and the Blank Slate doctrine is a secular baptism, washing away the stain of biological determinism.
In the liberal democracy genesis tale, everyone emerges from the womb with pure potential, nothing genetically limiting. The Immaculate Conception Blank Slate precept is a fiction advancing harmful fabrications about the human condition and our organic variation. We lie about our innate differences, rather than embrace them.
Whether we accept or reject Blank Slatism depends on the topic. We recognize the role of genetics when the subject is uncontroversial and suits our priors. We accept some people are temperamentally violent, shy, extroverted, aggressive, talkative. We don’t object to personality being a confluence of innate temperamental traits. Which is to say, genetic. Acknowledging this won’t get you in trouble.
We understand children of smart parents tend to also be smart. That neuron count and synapse quantity are a genetic stamp. We understand an NBA player’s fast-twitch fibers and long limbs provide abilities that training never will. We intuitively grasp that not all men are created equal on the field of play.
We do not object to intelligence and athleticism being overwhelmingly genetic. These examples refute Blank Slate Theory across mind and body.
Biofoundationalism simply observes the same genetic realities and is consistent with their application.
The belief that the political is an acceptable form of Blank Slate Theory — distinct from the temperamental rather than synonymous with it — exists because the political is the only one that we believe operates consciously and can be changed with the right facts and arguments.
Just as neurons inform your IQ and fast-twitch fibers your athleticism, the amygdala, ACC, and insula dictate how you neurologically process the world and its information. Our recognition of the role of genetics cannot be selectively applied. If you reject Blank Slate Theory, then I contend you already agree with this essay, you just don’t know it yet.
Biofoundationalism is a uniform repudiation of Blank Slate mythology. It uses the same data, reasoning, and empiricism you’d accept in other domains.
Now, let’s look at some brain scans.
Neurological Studies
If you’re not interested in reviewing these studies and want to see a summary of their findings, you can skip ahead to the Research Summary section.
However, I’ve gone through many scientific papers, curated the high-impact information, and highlighted the most-pertinent parts below. It’s not long, and it’s the sort of thing that should haunt you in the best kind of way. It’s worth your time.
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Part 1: Brain Structure
Brain structure alone predicts political beliefs with 72% accuracy
From Political Orientations Are Correlated with Brain Structure in Young Adults
“Substantial differences exist in the cognitive styles of liberals and conservatives on psychological measures [1]. Variability in political attitudes reflects genetic influences and their interaction with environmental factors [2, 3]. Recent work has shown a correlation between liberalism and conflict-related activity measured by event-related potentials originating in the anterior cingulate cortex [4].
Here we show that this functional correlate of political attitudes has a counterpart in brain structure. In a large sample of young adults, we related self-reported political attitudes to gray matter volume using structural MRI.
We found that greater liberalism was associated with increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex, whereas greater conservatism was associated with increased volume of the right amygdala.
These results were replicated in an independent sample of additional participants. Our findings extend previous observations that political attitudes reflect differences in self-regulatory conflict monitoring [4] and recognition of emotional faces [5] by showing that such attitudes are reflected in human brain structure.
We characterized the extent to which these correlations between gray matter volume and political attitudes might permit us to determine the political attitudes of a single individual based on their structural MRI scan. We used the gray matter volume of anterior cingulate cortex and right amygdala from each individual to train a multivariate classifier [9].
The gray matter volumes of ACC and the right amygdala allowed the classifier to distinguish individuals who reported themselves as conservative from those who reported themselves as very liberal with a high accuracy (71.6% ± 4.8% correct, p = 0.011).
This suggests that it is possible to determine the self-expressed political attitude of individuals, at least for the self-report measure we used, based on structural MRI scans.
Highlights:
► Political liberalism and conservatism were correlated with brain structure ► Liberalism was associated with the gray matter volume of anterior cingulate cortex ► Conservatism was associated with increased right amygdala size.
Post amygdala.
Part 2: Neurocognition (Brain Activity)
Risk-taking behaviors and neurological activity (which regions of your brain activate during decision-making) predict your political affiliations with 83% accuracy (!).
Brain structure alone gives us 72% accuracy; brain activity gives us 83%.
Again, this is without AI.
From Red Brain, Blue Brain: Evaluative Processes Differ in Democrats and Republicans
“Liberals and conservatives exhibit different cognitive styles and converging lines of evidence suggest that biology influences differences in their political attitudes and beliefs. In particular, a recent study of young adults suggests that liberals and conservatives have significantly different brain structure, with liberals showing increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex, and conservatives showing increased gray matter volume in the in the amygdala.
Here, we explore differences in brain function in liberals and conservatives by matching publicly available voter records to 82 subjects who performed a risk-taking task during functional imaging.
Although the risk-taking behavior of Democrats (liberals) and Republicans (conservatives) did not differ, their brain activity did.
Democrats showed significantly greater activity in the left insula, while Republicans showed significantly greater activity in the right amygdala.
A two-parameter model of partisanship based on amygdala and insula activations yields a better fitting model of partisanship than a well-established model based on parental socialization of party identification long thought to be one of the core findings of political science.
These results suggest that liberals and conservatives engage different cognitive processes when they think about risk, and they support recent evidence that conservatives show greater sensitivity to threatening stimuli.
These ideological differences between political partisans have been attributed to logical, psychological, and social constraints [4] and past scholarship has focused primarily on institutional political processes or individual policy preferences, rather than biological differences in evaluative processes.
But recent work has revealed physiological correlates of the differential responses to risk and conflict by liberals and conservatives.
Consistent with the previously identified attitudinal divergence, conservatives have more intense physical reactions to threatening stimuli than liberals [5]. Conversely, liberals had stronger physiological responses to situations of cognitive conflict than conservatives [6].
Physical reactions. Born with it.
“Republicans more strongly activate their right amygdala, associated with orienting attention to external cues. Democrats have higher activity in their left posterior insula, associated with perceptions of internal physiological states.
That differences in the processing of risk and uncertainty differentiate liberals and conservatives suggests an alternative way of conceptualizing ideology.”
Predictability:
“A simple model of partisanship that includes mother’s and father’s party accurately predicts about 69.5% of self-reported choices between the Democratic and Republican party (see Table S1 in Appendix S1).
A classifier model based upon differences in brain structure distinguishes liberals from conservatives with 71.6% accuracy [15].
Yet, a simple two-parameter model of partisanship using activations in the amygdala and the insular cortex during the risk task significantly out-performs the longstanding parental model, correctly predicting 82.9% of the observed choices of party.”
Your politics can be predicted with 72% accuracy by brain structure, and 83% accuracy by brain activity.
Post amygdala.
Part 3: Disgust Sensitivity
From A Neurology of the Conservative-Liberal Dimension of Political Ideology
“This review summarizes personality, evolutionary and genetic, cognitive, neuroimaging, and neurological studies of conservatism-liberalism and discusses how they might affect political ideology.
There is increasing evidence that neurobiological factors mediate where people fall on a general conservative-liberal axis that involves social, cultural, religious, economic, and other domains, as well as political ideology.
Many studies now indicate that differences between extreme conservatives and extreme liberals are not entirely due to differences in socioeconomic, cultural, or other learned attributes, or rational consideration of the issues.3
Conservatism-liberalism is also associated with differences in personality, attention, memory, perception, emotional reactions, problem-solving, and response choices.4 (Personal comment: This is a long-winded way of saying “temperament”)
Although neurobiological mechanisms affecting conservatism-liberalism are not clearly deterministic, some investigators suggest an evolutionary protective origin, with some situations favoring more conservative orientations and others permitting more liberal ones.4
What emerges from this highly variable literature is evidence for a normal right-sided “conservative-complex” involving structures sensitive to negativity bias, threat, disgust, and avoidance.
This part is kind of funny:
“This conservative-complex may be damaged with brain disease, sometimes leading to a pathological “liberal shift” or a reduced tendency to conservatism in political ideology.
Further support for neurobiological mechanisms comes from clinical observations of patients with acquired brain disease.
Neurological disorders that affect socioemotional areas of the frontal lobes and adjacent regions can change where one falls on the conservative-liberal spectrum, primarily toward the liberal.5
Part 4: The Behavioral Immune System
Continued from A Neurology of the Conservative-Liberal Dimension of Political Ideology
“Evolutionary psychologists stress that politics and alliances are necessary in order to influence one’s position in social groups and the direction of one’s group4 and have proposed the parasite-stress theory as a major driving force for the evolution of conservatism-liberalism.26,27
The parasite-stress theory views people as having inherited parasitically modified behavioral tendencies aimed at avoiding those who bring the greatest risk of infection and transmitted disease to one’s social group. Those who do not conform to in-group norms and members of outgroups with unfamiliar cultures and behaviors bring the greatest risk of infection and are avoided the most.
In other words, parasitic stress may promote in-group collectivism or “groupishness” and group social norms,28–30 as well as conservative social and sexual attitudes and distrust of strangers,26,30–32 all of which defend against the effects of parasites.32
This “behavioral immune system” works through a basic instinct to avoid contamination via the experience of disgust from disease-laden cues and people who may harbor infectious agents.30,33
In comparing political conservatives with political liberals, investigators report greater disgust sensitivity, especially for contamination disgust and violations of the sense of purity,34–37 and greater functional MRI (fMRI) responses to images with a disgusting theme, such as mutilated bodies.38
Just showing people disease-related images can lead to increasing feelings of avoidance,39 and inducing disgust with disgusting images or sensations can both boost the physiological immune response and increase prejudice to outgroups.26,33,40
Inducing disgust can heighten the sense of moral violations and shift moral judgments to the conservative side.41
Part 5: Negativity Bias and Threat Perception
Continued from A Neurology of the Conservative-Liberal Dimension of Political Ideology
“The further one is on the conservative spectrum, the more likely one is to respond to negative aspects of environmental stimuli, as opposed to positive aspects.22–24,57
This “negativity bias” is evident in studies showing that negative images shown to political conservatives, compared with political liberals, results in a greater, faster, and longer attentional focus on the images and greater physiological measures of arousal to them, as well as a stronger tendency to avoid them.55,58
In addition to negativity bias, high conservatism is associated with a sense of threat or a perception of danger.1,10
Those with politically conservative versus politically liberal views perceive ambiguous faces as more threatening,16 respond to threatening stimuli with more aggression,1 and have greater blink startle responses and skin conduction responses to unexpected or potentially threatening images.59
On behavioral and eye-movement responses during a visual search task for happy and angry faces, political conservatism correlated with speeded detection of angry versus happy faces suggesting speeded response selection to the perception of threat.63
In a related study of websites and speeches, political conservatives tended to reference the known past, whereas strong liberals considered the uncertain and potentially more threatening future.64
Conservatives are genetically calibrated for threat detection.
Post amygdala = show morality = show politics
Part 6: The Passion of the Insula
Continued from A Neurology of the Conservative-Liberal Dimension of Political Ideology
More reinforcement on the power of the amygdala and the influence of the insula. The prefrontal cortex shows up as well.
“Neuroimaging studies suggest that political ideology involves conservative-liberal differences in the amygdala, insula, and ACC.4,69,70
Just being interested in politics has increased activity in the amygdala and the ventral striatum,71 and encoding party preference activates bilateral insula and the ACC.69
Political conservatives, compared with political liberals, have greater gray matter in the right amygdala,72 and an fMRI study involving a risk-taking task shows that political conservatives have greater activity in the right amygdala.73
The association of political conservatism with the right amygdala,72 a structure that is bilaterally sensitive to emotional saliency, especially fear, suggests an increased processing of potential signals for threat.74
Although the anterior insula has a prominent role in the experience of disgust, brain responses to disgusting stimuli may show a more distributed pattern of differences between political conservatism and liberalism,38 consistent with a differential sensitivity for disgust among political conservatives.
The unexpected association of political liberalism with activity in the left posterior insula in one study may reflect an additional role of the insula in the expression of interpersonal trust.75
Finally, political liberals have greater gray matter and increased ERP activity in the ACC,12,72,73 consistent with a sensitivity for processing signals for potential change.
Perhaps the most remarkable finding is found in Functional connectivity signatures of political ideology:
Brain connectivity classified ideology while participants sat quietly doing nothing.
The amygdala, inferior frontal gyrus, and hippocampus fire differently in liberals and conservatives at rest. No political stimulus, tasks, or prompts. Idle, and still broadcasting allegiance.
Three tasks had strong political links: empathy processing, episodic memory, and reward evaluation. This replicated.
Moral genotypes produce political phenotypes. The environment dictates their expression. Biofoundationalism.
Genetic Research Summary
Recapping neurological and temperamental evidence:
Amygdala Size and Activity
Conservatives: Larger amygdala, greater activation
Core function: Fear response, threat detection, negative-stimuli sensitivity, reactions to social and environmental cues.
What this means: Conservatives are wired to be more reactive to potential threats and uncertainties. This translates into a preference for stability, security, and tradition.
Liberals: Smaller amygdala, less active.
Lower threat response, more willing to engage new things.
What this means: Liberals are more open to change and the unknown due to diminished threat sensitivity and reduced awareness of negative stimuli.
Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC) Size and Activation
Liberals: Larger ACC, greater activation.
Core function: Processes conflicting information, monitors dissonance between automatic responses and goal-directed reasoning.
What this means: Liberals are more accepting of nuance, new perspectives, and ambiguity.
Conservatives: Smaller ACC, less activation.
Less willing to engage with ambiguity and uncertainty, more aware of potential threats that come with it.
What this means: Conservatives prefer clear, black-and-white distinctions and tend to stick with existing beliefs and the known past.
Insula Activity
Conservatives: Higher activation in the right insula, which plays a key role in the Behavioral Immune System and disgust responses.
Core function: Processing disgust responses, especially moral disgust (i.e. things that feel impure or wrong), linked to moral judgments, especially around purity and contamination
What this means: Conservatives have a heightened sensitivity to violations of sanctity (purity) and social norms.
Example: Strong reaction to subjects like sexual deviance, immigration (outgroup members), and ingroup social standards (the sanctity/degradation moral foundation).
Liberals: Higher activation in the left insula, which is linked to empathy rather than disgust.
Core function: Processing social emotions, sympathy toward outgroups
What this means: Liberals are more sensitive to perceived social injustice and inequalities.
Example: Support for social programs, refugee rights, and outgroup-focused causes that draw on sympathy/empathy (care/harm moral foundation).
The insula tells two stories: it’s more active in conservative disgust responses, whereas it lights up in liberals when evoking empathy. Personally, I think this is more accurately described as a sympathy response, not empathy.
Threat Sensitivity and Physical Reactions
Conservatives have heightened threat sensitivity and greater physical reactions to stimuli (!).
Observable in their subconscious reactions to physical signals. Including faster blink startle movement and skin-conduction responses to unexpected or potentially threatening images.
This is one of the most compelling pieces of evidence for the existence of political biology. Your ‘politics’ show up at the level of subconscious physical reaction.
You can make someone more liberal by disabling the posterior medial frontal cortex: softening their stances on immigration and religion.
Political affiliation can be predicted with 72% accuracy via brain structure, and 83% accuracy with brain activity.
Conservative brains are wired for threat detection, stability, and ingroup purity (disgust response in insula).
Liberal brains are wired for flexibility, openness to new experiences, and social fairness (greater sympathy response in insula).
These processes occur largely unconsciously, then get post-hoc narrated otherwise. The political is an extension of the biological. The evidence exists, and we willfully choose to ignore it. You have a neural fingerprint associated with your political beliefs. A moral language encoded within you.
I find this information to be both humbling and inspiring. I hope you do too.
Causality & Coincidences
Every piece of neurological and behavioral research with political ramifications ostentatiously includes the same tedious qualifiers, refusing to address causality. They identify mechanisms, then run away from what they just discovered, because of the inconvenience of what it suggests. Blank Slate ideology is so thoroughly entrenched it blinds and silences us from discussing this honestly. Academics thread the needle of exposing realities of biology while leaving Western Immaculate Conception untouched.
Refusal to attribute causality is intellectual cowardice. A fear of the ramifications of admitting our genetic substrate; it unearths a third rail no one wants to touch. It takes science to see these neural differences; it takes courage to candidly identify what you’re looking at.
You don’t need the brain studies to see the innate nature of moral temperaments.
Conservatism and liberalism are self-evidently a natural dyad because they maintain reliable distributions across societies and timelines.
Take a look at Western and European voting patterns and their omnipresent ~50-50 electoral splits. Now do male/female birth rates. Pick any society-level distribution that persists across centuries. Why are they so enduringly present? An ongoing coincidence across history and civilizations?
One set of sacrosanct traits is just a bunch of sovereign individuals that keep happening to fall into the same distributions. Blank Slatism demands we presuppose such a ridiculous coincidence is possible.
If politics were an individual choice, election results would not be so consistent. They would chaotically vary! We’d have open elections with wildly different aggregate results, ones where liberals or conservatives won with 96% of the vote. Yet they don’t. This is how you know you’re dealing with a biological pattern.
Consistent distributions of traits and behaviors reveal a biological phenomenon, not a man-made one. Nature doesn’t do coincidences at scale.
The brain scans are unnecessary to see the genetic basis of morality, but when you add neurology to the mix, the reality becomes undeniable and the causality cannot be concealed.
Nature Doesn't Do Coincidences at Scale
We are a species evolved for group strategy and collaboration. Our ancestors didn’t develop in isolation picking berries by themselves. They were cultivated among collectives, and everybody didn’t fulfill the same role.
Our traits gestated over millennia to be different in a complementary fashion.
Nature does not see us at individual scale; she incubated us within collectives. Hierarchies are how we organize and dyads are how we balance. This entails biological characteristics that are mostly immutable and supposed to vary.
It’s inspiring to operate under the false pretense that we act as individual pieces of moldable clay. However we’re taking these Western myths too far, creating fantasy ideologies that produce delusional solutions. You are not an island. You did not evolve in isolation. None of us are Blank Slates. Believing in Santa Claus is good if it motivates a child to behave well. Believing in Santa well into your 30s and thinking you’ll get free gifts for being nice this year is a severe delusion that’s no longer helpful.
We don’t value the same things in the same ways. This annoys the individual but is a strength for the society. No single man can uphold all moral foundations equally, but a human group can. Group-level temperamental diversity grants flexibility and adaptability. Moral priorities have different utility in different environments; it’s beneficial to have individual variation. These contrasting traits should be seen as complements to the group. Synergistic, countervailing forces that make the whole stronger.
A dyad is identified when removing one side produces an error. What does masculine even mean without feminine?
What’s conservative is only known by what’s liberal. Left has no orientation without right. There is no “day” if there is no “night”.
Masculine and feminine don’t exist in isolation; they’re defined in relation to each other. They’re supplementary companions contributing toward a shared goal of survival and prosperity. The same as conservative and liberal.
When one side overwhelms, something corrosive develops. A yin should not view its yang as the enemy. We’re neurologically hardwired to have divergent values that uniquely contribute to human cooperatives. Our differences are implanted deep within us. Don’t fear them. We should be inspired by what we are, not run from it. Be humble. You’re an animal too, even if you’re indignant about it. Just as the cat, eagle, and wolf have their programming, so do all of us.
When I describe political allies as “temperamental kin”, I mean there’s literally more neural similarity among those with similar politics. The brain of the liberal and conservative are not the same. You have more in common with political allies than you think.
Nature be my god. There are no coincidences at scale.
Concluding: AI & Biomarkers
Is your curiosity sparked, or are you agitated and dismissive? If you got this far, you probably skew the former. There are clues in this.
Elements of your personality are revealed if you entertain the notion of a moral genotype or run away from it on sight. Your receptiveness to the concept of political biology illuminates your biology. Everything is a biomarker.
If we were building a cognitive profile, I could begin to triangulate political beliefs based on read time. Finishing this essay suggests openness to new ideas, which speaks to ACC activation when encountering novelty. A framework outlining immutable genetic differences and innate political thinking entails human biovariation. This directly contravenes Blank Slate hopes, which undermines “social construct” claims about sex and race disparities and where they come from. Your response says something about your temperament.
If I had data on eye movement while reading, we’d get a lens into which parts angered you, providing potential amygdala and insula insights. No single trait is definitive, but several of them form an increasingly compelling composite.
If reactions to puffs of air in your ear reveals your politics, can you imagine what other subtle tendencies tell us? AI is already revealing this. Based on traits like the prosody and tenor of your voice, eye movement while watching a screen, how you slide your computer mouse, and startle responses, we’ll be able to deduce political beliefs. Your moral genotype triangulated off gait analysis, music tastes, and linguistic patterns.
When AI is exposed to enough of our sequences, we won’t need brain scans. AI will extrapolate biotraits from banal behaviors and physical traits. The mind and body are inextricably entwined and cannot be concealed from each other. The hardware whispers the software.
This isn’t hyperbole. Here’s what it’s already figuring out:
AI can reconstruct your face from your voice. The vibrations of vocal cords illuminate what you look like. Research linked here.
AI can determine your race from pixelated X-rays. Researchers have no idea how it’s able to do it. Medical and academic consensus says determining race from X-rays is impossible, yet this “social construct” shows up in your bones.
AI can predict brain activity five seconds into the future. A mystic would call this “precognition”. Yet it’s just pattern extrapolation.
Don’t fight your humanity with Blank Slate fictions. Relish and recognize intrinsic differences. Try to understand the real basis of moral conflict. We evolved in collectives and are designed to be different. Political balance is healthy; an asymmetrical dyad produces a hypermoralized, fractured society.
You have more in common with political allies than you think. And more to be grateful for regarding political adversaries than led to believe. We’re counterweights in a shared mechanism. Opposing notes in the same chord.
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Biofoundationalism Corpus: Chapters and Application
This is the current Biofoundationalism corpus. Numbered parts are core chapters. Subgroup essays fall under Applied Biofoundationalism: examples, extensions, and applications of the biological and thermodynamic frameworks developed in the chapters.
Each piece can be read independently, though it’s best understood when read in sequence.
a clarifying point, because some have remarked in the comments on how political designations are inconsistent over time:
you'll note I use the terms 'conservative/liberal' and not 'republican/democrat' or other political branding.
when I say conservative, I mean the morality that experiences disgust responses in the insula and has a larger amygdala. I consider this a masculine moral genotype, producing a conservative political phenotype.
when I say liberal, I mean the morality that experiences a sympathy response in the insula and has a larger ACC. I consider this a feminine moral genotype, producing a liberal political phenotype.
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On definitions:
I consider 'conservative' appropriate terminology because it protects the ingroup, is hierarchical, emphasizes the behavioral immune system, and appeals to stability and the known past. this is inherently conservative (it seeks to "conserve"). whether or not tories, republicans, or other "rightwing" parties actually do this is not the point. the parties often shift over time. this is why I don't use political party nomenclature.
liberal is an appropriate term because it's open to new experiences, more intellectually flexible, more concerned with care/harm and less so hierarchies (thus more feminine). its outgroup emphasis is at the expense of "conservation" of ideals/standards and not as focused on threat detection. whether or not democrats or other "leftwing" parties embody this, again, is not the point. the nominal parties are prone to shifting over time.
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Additional thoughts:
the ability of these moral genotypes to fully express themselves as political phenotypes is always contingent on the environment; this is why I often say in my essays "the environment dictates the expression". for animal species, the environment dictates how genotypes express their phenotypes. I find it to be no different for humans.
the environment is very decadent in the west, this facilitates more pronounced feminine moral genotype expression, creating a more dominant liberal political phenotype. this can only happen in a backdrop of comfort and prosperity.
conversely, in environments trending towards hardship, poverty, or war, that environment allows masculine moral genotypes, resulting in dominant conservative political phenotypes, to take hold. the concept of hypermoralization, which is covered in Part 1, touches on this too.
no hedonism in poverty, no discipline in decadence.
I'll defend and elaborate on this in Biofoundationalism Part IV. it's not as byzantine as it seems, promise.
a standalone comment:
One of the most unsettling things AI will reveal is how physical traits, outward appearance, characteristics of one's body, are neurological signatures. How the hardware whispers the software.
The body and mind cannot be decoupled. Two realms that create one system. They are entwined. Hardware and software work if the other does. For similar reasons why you can't get melody from a broken instrument, we will be shown how the carnal is a window into the cognitive.
Neuroscience and embodied cognition research show thought isn’t isolated in the skull. Posture, gut microbiome, hormonal state, even muscle tone, all feed back into temperament, mood, and decision-making. It does not stop there.
People will either be disturbed, or elated, by what's revealed by traits we were duly informed were entirely distinct from our minds. Faces have temperamental fingerprints. Psychology embedded in morphology. The machine is already able to spot these patterns....